the truth is this:
by dolokhovian
Summary: the stars have never loved each other, and you have never loved the stars.


In the end it is you and the universe, facing each other. Dimensions fall away and leave you in the remainder.

The stars are so far away from each other in space; they never tell you that. Children believe if they could touch one, they could touch them all, but the truth is this:

The stars have never loved each other, and you have never loved the stars.

They are vain; they are selfish, brilliant, cruel. They persist; you might curse them and they burn regardless. The best ones do not go without a fight: They swallow the whole sky, and flare brighter, flare blinding, as if to prove with their dying breath that they were worth something after all.

In the end it is you in a spaceship that is falling apart, a flask in one hand and a gun in the other. You stole your liver from a good man, and your shoes from a bad one, but who cares? They're both dead now.

You are alive against every odd. You are alive in spite of yourself. You have always been your biggest enemy; _you_ , not any other dimensional version of you, just this old man standing at the edge of the void, pretending death might not scare him after all.

If death didn't scare you, you'd be dead by now. The same goes for happiness, for hope; _for love_ , you want to say, but you'd be lying. You have been in love.

You were in love, once, and made the mistake of making it permanent: You can blur _her_ face if you squint hard enough, but have never been able to drink away the first time your daughter smiled, or her first steps, or the sound of her laugh. Watching her still sometimes makes your heart leap.

You are the only one alive now who remembers that she was born glowing. That she opened her eyes and they were the forget-me-not blue of her mother's. That her crying seemed justified, like, _Yeah, kid, me too_ ; like maybe this baby got what was going on, after all.

Now the world has mutated her into something uglier, emptier, like it does with all living things. She is tired and unhappy and she drinks too much; her children love her but she knows children are dumb like that. This is the pattern of the universe: Failure begets failure begets failure begets. Every world breaks everybody down and people keep creating new life like it's special.

Nothing's special. You are not the only one to learn this early. You are not even the only one who has turned your existentialism into a chain of fucked-up and unnecessary cataclysmic events. But you are the only one who has broken out of a maximum-security galactic prison in seventy-two point four different dimensions only to find yourself here at the end of it, in the blackness between stars, drinking in a sardonic self-toast to your own health while you wonder why, out of all Ricks everywhere, you had to be the one to give a shit.

Because in a few hours, you're going to go home, and you're going to tinker with that junk in the garage and then come back to space, and you're going to keep Morty from getting killed even though he isn't worth shit in the grand scheme of the multiverse. You're going to tell Summer to shut up when she complains about her data overages, and you're going to destroy and/or save a couple of planets no thanks to either of them before going back home. As long as you have a home to go back to, you're proving to yourself you care; as long as you pretend your grandkids aren't absorbing all the worst parts of you, you're proving to yourself you're selfish.

So _what?_ you think. Everyone's selfish. What else have fifty goddamn years on the planet and several hundred off it proven to you? Why should you feel bad about it?

And why does space feel so empty when you stare at it too long?

Human genius is always met with human weakness, no matter how sociopathic the test subject. You wish the first came without the other. The latter so often does, and God, you wish you were that, sometimes; wish you were a moron without a single brave or clever bone in your body. Instead you had to be some fucking prodigy always wrapping your tongue around words too big for your fucking mouth, and maybe you aren't _brave_ per se but you are willing to kill yourself when it counts the most.

 _Aren't you?_

Who knows.

You've seen thousands of universes and not one where you're happy. You have seen a good very many where you're dead. Those bastards know better than you, you guess. Maybe one day you'll stop running.

But for now, you'll run, you'll hide, you'll drink, you'll steal. Variably, you'll play the electric guitar. And the stars, those fuckers, they'll have nothing on you; you'll pretend they aren't older, that they probably know better, that you really understand nothing of the fucking void. And all the dimensions will come back into view, and you will leave the darkness waiting.

The truth is this:

When you were young, you already understood that your future lay outside of Earth's atmosphere. This is not to say you did not fear the night. Space was always judging in a cold, familiar way, like an adult who knows you're sitting there but refuses to acknowledge your presence, and time itself never seemed trustworthy to you: When you learned of paradoxes, you were more relieved than anything. So your relationship with existence has always been strained. You have known, for longer than you should have known, that one day you'll need to answer to it.

But it has always asked more of you than you've known how to give, and today is not that day.

In the end it is you and the universe, facing each other. And you turn the spaceship around.

* * *

 _a/n: are you ready?_


End file.
